Former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has been released from prison due to the risk of contagion from Covid-19, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
Paul Manafort had been sentenced last year to seven and a half years in prison for various frauds uncovered as part of the Russian investigation into suspicions of collusion between Moscow and the Donald Trump campaign team during the 2016 presidential election.
The former political consultant, who was incarcerated in a prison in Pennsylvania, suffers from high blood pressure and respiratory problems, which makes him more vulnerable to the virus, said last month in a letter to the prison authorities his lawyer Kevin Downing.
More than 2,000 American detainees released
The latter said that his client would serve the rest of his sentence at his home in Alexandria, in the suburbs of Washington. Paul Manafort is one of 2,471 inmates in US federal prisons to have been released (out of approximately 150,000 inmates in total) due to the pandemic.
President Donald Trump expressed support after his conviction, saying he was the victim of a "witch hunt". Another of his relatives who fell in the wake of the Russian investigation, his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, asked last month to be released from prison, to no avail.
Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for fraud, perjury and violation of election campaign laws after paying two women in 2016 to end their alleged affair with Donald Trump.
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